Brownie Packin' Momma

Hmm, this review kind of bites off more than it can chew, doesn't it? Starts well, and then gets messy, until I'm throwing Borges at it in a desperate attempt to get things to stick together.

Interesting fact 1: Youthmovies dropped the last two words from their name, and are now a much better band.

Interesting fact 2: When this reivew was published the naughty word was edited out. Fine by me, but "tosh" really doesn't have the same force as "shit". Surely you could have found a better synonym, ed!

BROWN OWL/ YOUTH MOVIE SOUNDTRACK STRATEGIES/ WOLVES! (OF GREECE), 26/2/03

People were rathe apocalyptic in the mid-nineties...must have been the encroaching millenium. Why else would they coin the term "post-rock"? Did it really seem as though rock were a vast, unwieldy corpse to scavenge? Well, nowadays post-rock doesn't give us images of the death of an artform, but normally translates as "no singer, and they don't do ska-punk knees up". Brown Owl are post-rock in the latter sense (tempo changes, spastic drum fills, neverending pieces, pseudo-bebop cymbal splahes), but they don't do it badly at all. Their references are pretty standard: Shallac, Slint, Aerial M, blah blah (cut up some old post-rock reviews and write this sentence yourself, kids). This doesn't stop them being ace - they just stay within the confines of the genre.

There are onnly three orf them, but sometimes two of them are drummers, and a two-drumkit lineup works for me (Adam Ant, The Fall '82 vintage, Circle). They're jerky, intricate, comical, elastic, irridescent - everything you want from post-rock, really. Then again, this stuff's more about texture than tune, so live performances are a little frustrating. Get them into a giant studio with a grat big effects machine and then we're talking.

It's hard to do justice to variable, semi-successful bands in these short reviews: "unexpugrated shit" and "undying genius" are such pithy phrases, but the middle ground's hard to pin down. Youth Move Soundtrack Strategies are like two separate bands simultaneously, one a hardcore bludgeoning beast, and one a dissonant, experimental miasma: if only one were better than the other, it would be easier for me. Sigh.

There are a lot of good sounds here, like yapping viocals, abstract synths, pounding drums, megaphone gurgle, and wandering guitars. Sometimes they gel, and sometimes they don't: I'm not sure which is more interesting. Lost-in-the-post-rock.

R.E.M. named early tune "Wolves, Lower" because they "liked the comma". Wolves! (Of Greece) have a similar love of punctuation (and the lupine), though not as much as :zoviet*france: or si-{cut}.db. Borges told us that it is the logical end of any art to "overdo its own tricks". Wolves! certainly feel as though they've stretched their artpunk trickbag to the limit, perhaps bringing us back to post-rock's millenial definition.

The instruments crackle away inside a wall of impenetrable feedback, whilst the vocalist rants inaudibly; visually the flailing Wolves" are chimps' teaparty meets playgroup tartrazine OD (uptown, presumably), and they spend as much time on the floor as upright. A celebratory critique of rock excesses? Or some noisy men leaping aournd? Like cheap alcohol it can be intoxicating if you give yourself up to it, but I wouldn't advise it as a way to spend an evening.